Just a week before Election Day, the crisis gripping the
American ruling class and its state, marked by intractable and bitter
internal conflicts, has erupted into open political warfare.

Last
Friday’s letter from Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey to
Congress announcing new "investigative steps" in the probe of Democratic
presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, itself a manifestation of the
crisis, has brought the underlying tensions to the boiling point. It has
exposed raging conflicts within the FBI and, more broadly, the national
security apparatus as a whole.

Comey’s cryptic letter acknowledged that
the FBI has not actually reviewed a new batch of emails that "appear to be
pertinent" to its previous investigation into Clinton’s use of a private
email server for official business while she was secretary of state. The
agency, he wrote, "cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be
significant." This astonishing admission makes all the more
extraordinary Comey’s decision to make the discovery of the new emails a
public issue only eleven days before the election.

In a rapid-fire
series of developments this weekend, Justice Department officials revealed
that they had opposed Comey’s decision to send the letter, arguing that it
violated a longstanding principle that no Justice Department or FBI action
that might impact on a candidate should be announced within 60 days of an
election.

The Clinton campaign and congressional Democrats lashed out at
Comey for the timing of the letter. At a campaign rally in Daytona Beach,
Florida, Clinton said Comey’s action is "not just strange, it’s
unprecedented." She also tweeted that "FBI Director Comey bowed to partisan
pressure," suggesting that the letter was an effort to appease congressional
Republican leaders opposed to Comey’s determination last July that there
was no basis for criminal charges against Clinton over her use of a
private email server.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid
sent a letter to Comey suggesting that he had violated the law forbidding
government employees to use their official positions to influence the result
of an election. "I am writing to inform you that my office has determined
that these actions may violate the Hatch Act," he wrote. "Through your
partisan actions, you may have broken the law."

He added that Comey
had "demonstrated a disturbing double standard for the treatment of
sensitive information, with what appears to be clear intent to aid one
political party over another," because he had made public the renewed FBI
interest in Clinton’s emails, but was silent on what Reid called "explosive
information" supposedly connecting Republican presidential candidate Donald
Trump to Russian government officials.

Here Reid was resorting to the
Russia-baiting that has been the Clinton campaign’s main response to the
publication by WikiLeaks of tens of thousands of emails and other documents
sent or received by campaign chairman John Podesta, including devastating
information on Bill Clinton’s use of the Clinton Foundation to obtain
lucrative speaking engagements with corporations and business associations.
Campaign spokesmen have refused to discuss the contents of the emails,
claiming that they were hacked by Russian government agents and then handed
over to WikiLeaks to damage Clinton and help Trump.

NBC News reported
Sunday that the FBI has now obtained a search warrant to go through all
650,000 emails found on the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner, the
estranged husband of Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin. Weiner is under
FBI investigation for allegedly sending sexually explicit text messages to
an underage girl.

The Wall Street Journal gave details, in a story posted
on its web site Sunday afternoon, of the explosive internal crisis within
the FBI that led to Comey’s letter to Congress. By this account, there has
been a fierce battle within the FBI and between the FBI and the Justice
Department not only over the Clinton email investigation, but over
separate investigations involving four FBI field offices (New York,
Washington DC, Los Angeles and Little Rock, Arkansas) into the
operations of the Clinton Foundation.

More than eight months ago, FBI
agents presented plans for a more aggressive investigation of the foundation
to career prosecutors in the Justice Department, only to have the proposal
blocked on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence. The FBI offices
nonetheless continued their investigations, which were intensified after the
Clinton email investigation was wound up in July.

The Journal report
suggests that either a substantial faction within the FBI was convinced that
top FBI officials were covering up criminal activities on the part of
Hillary and Bill Clinton, or the FBI dissidents were politically motivated
to use agency resources to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential
campaign, or both.

When top officials in the FBI and Justice Department
opposed these efforts, open rebellion followed, expressed in leaks to the
Wall Street Journal centrally targeting FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe,
whose wife was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for state senate in
Virginia last year. According to some press reports, Comey sent his
letter to Congress last week because he was convinced the information
would become public anyway through further leaks by FBI
subordinates.

The open warfare engulfing Washington on the eve of a
presidential election reveals that the entire political system and the state
apparatus itself are riven by tensions and conflicts so deep and bitter
that they cannot be contained within the traditional framework of
bourgeois elections. Fueling these tensions is the convergence of crises
on the economic, geopolitical, internal political and social
fronts.

The US and world economy remain mired in stagnation more than
eight years after the 2008 Wall Street crash, and there are growing fears
that central bank policies designed to buttress the banks and drive up stock
prices are leading to a new financial disaster. The economic crisis is
fueling social anger and alienation from the entire political system, as
reflected in different ways in the mass support for the anti-Wall Street
campaign of the self-styled "socialist" Bernie Sanders and the "America
first" pseudo-populist campaign of Donald Trump.

Twenty-five years of
unending war and fifteen years of the "war on terror" have failed to secure
US hegemony in the Middle East and only heightened fears within the ruling
elite that US imperialism is losing ground to rivals such as Russia and
China. The disarray of US policy in Syria, in particular, has led to bitter
conflicts and recriminations over US policy, and demands for a major
escalation of military violence, not only in Syria, but throughout the
Middle East. These are combined with calls for a more aggressive
confrontation with Russia and China. [...]

Will
She Make it to the White House? Waning Mainstream Media Support for Hillary
Clinton.

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, October 31,
2016

What has been the response of the mainstream media which sofar has
endorsed Hillary through a process of coverup of her criminal
undertakings?

Without mainstream media propaganda, Hillary’s political
legitimacy would collapse like a deck of cards. The Second Letter by FBI
Director James Comey opens up a "Pandora’s Box" of fraud and
corruption.

Moreover, following the October Surprise release by FBI
Director James Comey, the media narrative seems to have taken on a different
slant.

The media is controlled by powerful economic interest groups. Are
the power brokers behind Hillary having second thoughts? Does it serve their
interests in supporting a candidate who has an extensive criminal
record? Do they want a dysfunctional presidency?

Has the Mainstream
media dumped Hillary? Sof ar, Not Yet. With some exceptions the MSM
continues to support Hillary candidacy, without applause.

A report by the
Chicago Tribune (October 29, 2016) entitled "Democrats should ask Clinton
to step aside" is nonetheless revealing. does it point to shift in
direction? [...]

Has America become so numb
by the decades of lies and cynicism oozing from Clinton Inc. that it could
elect Hillary Clinton as president, even after Friday's FBI announcement
that it had reopened an investigation of her emails while secretary of
state?

We'll find out soon enough.

It's obvious the American
political system is breaking down. It's been crumbling for some time now,
and the establishment elite know it and they're properly frightened. Donald
Trump, the vulgarian at their gates, is a symptom, not a cause. Hillary
Clinton and husband Bill are both cause and effect.

FBI director
James Comey's announcement about the renewed Clinton email investigation is
the bombshell in the presidential campaign. That he announced this so close
to Election Day should tell every thinking person that what the FBI is
looking at is extremely serious.

This can't be about pervert Anthony
Weiner and his reported desire for a teenage girl. But it can be about the
laptop of Weiner's wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin, and emails between her
and Hillary. It comes after the FBI investigation in which Comey concluded
Clinton had lied and been "reckless" with national secrets, but said he
could not recommend prosecution.

If ruling Democrats hold themselves
to the high moral standards they impose on the people they govern, they
would follow a simple process:

They would demand that Mrs. Clinton step
down, immediately, and let her vice presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine of
Virginia, stand in her place.

Democrats should say, honestly, that with a
new criminal investigation going on into events around her home-brew email
server from the time she was secretary of state, having Clinton anywhere
near the White House is just not a good idea.

Since Oct. 7, WikiLeaks
has released 35,000 emails hacked from Clinton campaign boss John Podesta.
Now WikiLeaks, no longer a neutral player but an active anti-Clinton agency,
plans to release another 15,000 emails.

What if she is elected? Think of
a nation suffering a bad economy and continuing chaos in the Middle East,
and now also facing a criminal investigation of a president. Add to that
congressional investigations and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian
figure wandering the halls, wringing her hands.

The best thing would
be for Democrats to ask her to step down now. It would be the most
responsible thing to do, if the nation were more important to them than
power. And the American news media — fairly or not firmly identified in the
public mind as Mrs. Clinton's political action committee — should begin
demanding it.

But what will Hillary do?

She'll stick and ride this
out and turn her anger toward Comey. For Hillary and Bill Clinton, it has
always been about power, about the Clinton Restoration and protecting
fortunes already made by selling nothing but political
influence.

She'll remind the nation that she's a woman and that Donald
Trump said terrible things about women. If there is another notorious Trump
video to be leaked, the Clintons should probably leak it now. Then her
allies in media can talk about misogyny and sexual politics and the
headlines can be all about Trump as the boor he is and Hillary as champion
of female victims, which she has never been.

Remember that Bill
Clinton leveraged the "Year of the Woman." Then he preyed on women in the
White House and Hillary protected him. But the political left — most
particularly the women of the left — defended him because he promised to
protect abortion rights and their other agendas.

If you take a step back
from tribal politics, you'll see that Mrs. Clinton has clearly disqualified
herself from ever coming near classified information again. If she were a
young person straight out of grad school hoping to land a government job,
Hillary Clinton would be laughed out of Washington with her record. She'd
never be hired.

As secretary of state she kept classified documents on
the home-brew server in her basement, which is against the law. She lied
about it to the American people. She couldn't remember details dozens of
times when questioned by the FBI. Her aides destroyed evidence by BleachBit
and hammers. Her husband, Bill, met secretly on an airport tarmac with
Attorney General Loretta Lynch for about a half-hour, and all they said
they talked about was golf and the grandkids.

And there was no
prosecution of Hillary.

That isn't merely wrong and unethical. It is
poisonous.

And during this presidential campaign, Americans were
confronted with a two-tiered system of federal justice: one for standards
for the Clintons and one for the peasants.

I've always figured that,
as secretary of state, Clinton kept her home-brew email server — from which
foreign intelligence agencies could hack top secret information — so she
could shield the influence peddling that helped make the Clintons several
fortunes.

The Clintons weren't skilled merchants. They weren't traders or
manufacturers. The Clintons never produced anything tangible. They had
no science, patents or devices to make them millions upon millions of
dollars.

All they had to sell, really, was influence. And they used
our federal government to leverage it.

If a presidential election is
as much about the people as it is about the candidates, then we'll learn
plenty about ourselves in the coming days, won't we?

Listen to the
Chicago Way podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin. Guests are Tribune
cartoonist Scott Stantis and former White House Chief of Staff William
Daley: www.chicagotribune.com/kasspodcast.

By David Sirota @davidsirota
AND Andrew Perez (MapLight) AND Avi Asher-Schapiro On 10/31/16 AT 2:07
PM

Despite an anti-corruption rule that was designed to reduce the
financial industry’s political power, top officials from the investment
firm BlackRock hosted Hillary Clinton at campaign fundraisers earlier
this year. The cash -- which poured in through a loophole in the law —
came in as BlackRock’s federal contracts to manage billions of dollars
of retiree assets will be up for renewal during the next president’s
term.

In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission looked to stop
campaign donations to public officials from financial firms seeking to
convince those officials to hire them to manage public employees’ retirement
assets. The agency enacted a pay-to-play rule that applied such a
restriction to state and local officials. The rule, however, was
structured in a way that effectively exempted federal agencies from its
restrictions -- and it was created even though a major federal agency
had just been plagued by an investment-related influence-peddling
scandal.

In practice, the gap in the rule allows BlackRock executives to
raise big money for presidential candidates who -- if they win -- will
appoint the officials that run the federal Thrift Savings Plan, which awards
contracts to manage retirement assets for nearly 5 million current and
former federal employees. The loophole also allows Wall Street
executives to give cash to presidential candidates, even as those
executives’ firms get deals to manage -- and earn fees from --
investments for the federal government’s separate pension insurance
agency, which is run by presidential appointees.

In all, the loophole
in the SEC rule effectively leaves nearly a half-trillion dollars of
retirement assets unprotected by the nation’s major anti-corruption measure.
Clinton’s presidential campaign has raised more than $1 million from
financial firms that are contracted to manage those assets.

Two SEC
spokespeople, Ryan White and Judith Burns, declined to answer questions from
International Business Times and MapLight about the pay-to-play rule
carveout for federal agencies.

‘Particularly Vulnerable To Pay To Play
Practices’

This report is part of an IBT/MapLight series examining the
extent to which corporate interests are able to circumvent federal and state
anti-corruption rules designed to restrict the influence of money on
public policy.

When the SEC passed its rule to restrict Wall Street
campaign contributions, the agency said the measure was necessary because
publicly administered retirement programs "are particularly vulnerable
to pay to play practices" which can end up "leading to inferior
management, diminished returns or greater losses" for retirees. A study
released last month validated that concern: Researchers at Stanford,
Rice and Erasmus universities found that retirement systems whose
overseers "have received relatively more contributions from the
financial industry have lower returns."

Federal regulators ended up
prohibiting investment firms from earning fees from "a government entity" --
that is, a retirement system -- if firm executives donate to a public
official who has power to influence the retirement system’s investment
decisions. The rule, though, narrowly defined "government entity": It says
the term means only an agency at the state or local level, not the federal
government.

"There's no clear carve-out for federal plans, but the
definition itself also does not insinuate that they are covered," Benjamin
Keane, an attorney at the law firm Dentons, told
IBT/MapLight.

Through legislation, congressional lawmakers could close
the loophole by passing a pay-to-play law that defined "government entity"
to encompass the federal government. Without that, the loophole will remain.
[...]

One month before the presidential election of
2008, the giant Wall Street bank Citigroup submitted to the Obama campaign a
list of its preferred candidates for cabinet positions in an Obama
administration. This list corresponds almost exactly to the eventual
composition of Barack Obama’s cabinet.

The memorandum, revealed by
WikiLeaks in a recent document release from the email account of John
Podesta, who currently serves as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, was
written by Michael Froman, who was then an executive with Citigroup and
currently serves as US trade representative. The email is dated Oct. 6, 2008
and bears the subject line "Lists." It went to Podesta a month before he was
named chairman of President-Elect Obama’s transition team.

The email
was sent at the height of the financial meltdown that erupted after the
bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15. Even as Citigroup and its
Wall Street counterparts were dragging the US and world economy into its
deepest crisis since the 1930s, they remained, as the email shows, the real
power behind the façade of American democracy and its electoral
process.

For the
highly sensitive position of secretary of the Treasury, three possibilities
were presented: Robert Rubin and Rubin’s close disciples Lawrence Summers
and Timothy Geithner. Obama chose Geithner, then president of the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York. Geithner, along with Bush Treasury Secretary (and
former Goldman Sachs CEO) Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, had
played the leading role in organizing the Wall Street bailout.

Rubin
had served as Treasury secretary in the Bill Clinton administration from
1995 until 1999, when he was succeeded by Summers. In that capacity, Rubin
and Summers oversaw the dismantling of the Glass-Steagall Act (1933), which
had imposed a legal wall separating commercial banking from investment
banking. Immediately after leaving Treasury, Rubin became a top executive at
Citigroup, remaining there until 2009.

A notable aspect of the Froman
memo is its use of identity politics. Among the Citigroup executive’s lists
of proposed hires to Podesta were a "Diversity List" including "African
American, Latino and Asian American candidates, broken down by
Cabinet/Deputy and Under/Assistant/Deputy Assistant level," in Froman’s
words, and "a similar document on women." Froman also took diversity into
account for his White House cabinet list, "probability-weighting the
likelihood of appointing a diverse candidate for each position." This list
concluded with a table breaking down the 31 assignments by race and
gender.

Citigroup’s recommendations came just three days after
then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Troubled Asset Relief
Program, which allocated $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue the
largest Wall Street banks. The single biggest beneficiary was Citigroup,
which was given $45 billion in cash in the form of a government stock
purchase, plus a $306 billion government guarantee to back up its worthless
mortgage-related assets.

Then-presidential candidate Obama played a
critical political role in shepherding the massively unpopular bank bailout
through Congress. The September financial crash convinced decisive sections
of the US corporate-financial elite that the Democratic candidate of "hope"
and "change" would be better positioned to contain popular opposition to the
bailout than his Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona.

As
president, Obama not only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks, he saw
to it that not a single leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for
the orgy of speculation and swindling that led to the financial collapse and
Great Recession, and he personally intervened to block legislation capping
executive pay at bailed-out firms.

The same furtive and corrupt process
is underway in relation to a Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump administration.
Froman’s email is one of many thousands released by WikiLeaks from the
account of Podesta. Those communications, such as the Froman email, which
expose who really rules America, have been virtually ignored by the media.
The pro-Democratic Party New Republic called attention to it in an article
published Friday, but the story has received little if any further
coverage.

The media has instead focused on salacious details of
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s sexual activities, designed,
in part, to divert attention from the substance of the Clinton
campaign-related emails being released by WikiLeaks and other
sources.

The New Republic drew attention to the Froman memo not because
it opposes such machinations, but as a warning to the interests it
represents that they must move now to influence the eventual composition
of a Hillary Clinton administration.

"If the 2008 Podesta emails are
any indication, the next four years of public policy are being hashed out
right now, behind closed doors," wrote New Republic author David Dayen. "And
if liberals want to have an impact on that process, waiting until after the
election will be too late."

Claremont’s
Codevilla On the Coming Revolution "Americans Will Be Nostalgic For Donald
Trump’s Moderation."

Kevin MacDonald

October 11, 2016

We
are nearing the climax of a watershed election. The Ruling Class understands
that Donald Trump represents a counter-revolution to all they have built up
over the last 50 years. That emphatically includes GOP leaders like Speaker
Paul Ryan, who hastened not merely to step on Trump’s bounce back in the
second debate by announcing he was suspending support, but is signaling he
will continue to damage Trump as much as possible [Inside Ryan’s decision to
(almost) dump Trump| The speaker might still fully rescind his endorsement
before Nov. 8, sources told POLITICO, by Jakee Sherman and John Bresnahan,
Politico, October 11, 2016]

This phenomenon has inspired an important
essay from Angelo M. Codevilla, a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute
and emeritus professor of International Relations at Boston University, :
After the Republic. [Claremont Review, September 27, 2016]. Codevilla’s
basic idea: the cultural revolution of the last 50 years has destroyed
America as a constitutional republic. As many on the Alt Right have noted,
there is nothing left to conserve. The question now is where our
post-republic period will take us. Codevilla [Email him] writes

Because Republicans largely agree with Democrats that they need not take
seriously the founders’ Constitution, today’s American regime is now what
Max Weber had called the Tsarist regime on the eve of the Revolution: "fake
constitutionalism." Because such fakery is self-discrediting and removes
anyone’s obligation to restrain his passions, it is a harbinger of
revolution and of imperial power. [Emphasis added]

This is why we see
repeated crazy comparisons of Trump to Hitler—most recently, This New York
Times ‘Hitler’ review sure reads like a thinly disguised Trump comparison.
[By Aaron Blake, Washington Post, September 28, 2016] Despite absolutely no
statements from Trump suggesting that he would suspend the Constitution and
assume dictatorial powers, the concern is lurking that, like Hitler, he
would do just that.

The fundamental reason for this fear among the
elites: their guilty conscience. They understand that in the last 50 years
they have completely upended the old order in America. They have created a
revolution that opposes the most fundamental interests of the historic
white American nation. They understand that this election could confirm
their revolution—but only if Hillary Clinton wins.

Her victory would
mean continued Leftist appointments to the Supreme Court (Codevilla has an
excellent summary of the vast changes in "Constitutional Law" imposed by the
new regime) and it would mean importing around many millions more
non-whites, the great majority uneducated, poor, and dependent and the vast
majority of whom will be entirely on board with their revolution.

The
top-down nature of this revolution cannot be overemphasized. There was never
a demand by a majority, or even close to a majority, from any Western
country for a complete transformation, to the point that white people will
soon be minorities in societies they had dominated for hundreds and, in the
case of Europe, thousands of years. This top-down revolution has never been
supported by a majority of white Americans. There is anger, resentment, and
fear for the future.

Trump represents an inchoate backlash against this
revolution. But we have entered an era where it is too late to simply turn
back the clock. The changes have been too drastic. One could change the
legal situation with one or two judicious Supreme Court picks. But that will
not undo the importation of a new people—tens of millions of non-whites with
all that that implies for the future.

As Codevilla notes, because we
have entered an era of fake constitutionalism and because the most
fundamental interests of the traditional American majority have been r
uthlessly suppressed, there is no obligation to restrain one’s passions. The
situation is indeed what Codevilla calls "a harbinger of revolution and of
imperial power."

The new Ruling Class realizes that it rules by lawless
bureaucratic coercion:

In today’s America, a network of
executive, judicial, bureaucratic, and social kinship channels bypasses the
sovereignty of citizens. Our imperial regime, already in force, works on a
simple principle: the president and the cronies who populate these channels
may do whatever they like so long as the bureaucracy obeys and one third
plus one of the Senate protects him from impeachment. If you are on the
right side of that network, you can make up the rules as you go along,
ignore or violate any number of laws, obfuscate or commit perjury about what
you are doing (in the unlikely case they put you under oath), and be certain
of your peers’ support. These cronies’ shared social and intellectual
identity stems from the uniform education they have received in the
universities. Because disdain for ordinary Americans is this ruling
class’s chief feature, its members can be equally certain that all will
join in celebrating each, and in demonizing their respective opponents.
[My emphasis

While the traditional America aspired to be and
substantially attained a society based on individual merit, the new elite is
not a meritocracy (the poster child for this is Elena Kagan), and not just
in terms of Affirmative Action and ethnic favoritism in university
admissions. The Clintons may be seen as representative of the corruption of
this new ruling elite, able to flout laws with impunity. At this writing,
Hillary Clinton remains ahead in most national polls and has the support of
the entire Establishment, left to right, despite:

highly
credible charges of unprecedented corruption involving hundreds of millions
of dollars to the Clinton Foundation from donors, many of them foreign
entities, while she was Secretary of State, as well as outrageous speaking
fees for Bill Clinton from these same donors (importantly, his speaking fees
skyrocketed after Hillary became Secretary of State);

violation
of an agreement between Clinton and the Obama Administration not to accept
foreign donations during her tenure as Secretary of State;

the
destruction via BleachBit (a program designed to make the information
non-retrievable) of likely incriminating emails after a
subpoena,

being cleared of criminal conduct by the FBI that
would have sent ordinary people to prison;

her staff pleading
the Fifth Amendment in Congressional hearings; many of her staff
receiving immunity deals even there is good reason to think they lied to the
FBI;

an agreement for the FBI to destroy computer owned by Clinton
aides, including Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s Chief of Staff, plus looking
only at contents between June 1, 2014 and February 1, 2015 and hence
ignoring much possibly incriminating evidence. [...]

If the Democrats
win, Codevilla sees them driving "the transformations that it has already
wrought on America to quantitative and qualitative levels that not even its
members can imagine."

They would continue their war on traditional
"racist," "sexist" America with literally nothing to stop them.
The

disdain for how other Americans live and think has remained
fundamental…. The media reacted to Hillary Clinton’s remark that "half
of Trump’s supporters could be put into a ‘basket of deplorables’" as if
these sentiments were novel and peculiar to her. In fact, these are
unremarkable restatements of our ruling class’s perennial
creed.

Exactly.

Thus, despite appearances to the contrary, there
is a unified oligarchic Establishment that straddles both the Republican and
Democrat parties. This has not been so obvious in previous elections, when
Republicans and Democrats were apparently quite different on some issues.
However, the rise of Donald Trump has shown that the Establishment is
entirely united. For example, billionaires are supporting Hillary Clinton
20–1, whereas in previous elections, they were much more split between the
two parties. Not one Fortune 100 CEO is supporting Trump.

The other
pillar of the Ruling Class is the media which reflects academic culture and
political culture generally. The media, along with academia, and the
bureaucracy, have been prime drivers of this top-down revolution, in which
the moral and intellectual high ground has been seized by people hostile to
the traditional peoples and cultures of the West. This new Ruling Class is
completely out of touch with the interests of a majority of its
citizens—particularly White Americans. Thus the print media is almost
completely in the anti-Trump camp:

The [endorsements] are
overwhelmingly against him, and they just keep coming, in language that is
notable for its blunt condemnation of the candidate and its "save the
Republic’’ tone.

The endorsements are coming not only from the usual
mainstream media suspects but also from newspapers that either never before
supported a Democrat or had not in many decades—The Dallas Morning News,
The Arizona Republic, The Cincinnati Enquirer—or had never endorsed any
presidential candidate, like USA Today. The Wall Street Journal has not
gone there, at least not yet, but a member of its conservative-leaning
editorial board has: Dorothy Rabinowitz, who called Mr. Trump
"unfit."

What’s most striking is the collective sense of alarm they
convey—that Mr. Trump is a "dangerous demagogue" (USA Today) whose
election would represent a "clear and present danger" (The Washington
Post, The Cincinnati Enquirer), or, as The Atlanticeditor Scott Stossel
said in an interview Tuesday [October 4, 2016 "a potential national
emergency or threat to the Republic."[The Editorialists Have Spoken;
Will Voters Listen?, by Jim Rutenberg, NYT, October 5, 2016 ] [Links in
original]

It is ironic indeed that these media people see Trump as
threatening the republic when, as Codevilla notes, that republic is already
gone as a result of the actions of our new Ruling Class. [...]

But as
Codevilla notes,

Under our ruling class, "truth" has morphed from
the reflection of objective reality to whatever has "normative pull"—i.e.,
to what furthers the ruling class’s agenda, whatever that might be at any
given time. That is the meaning of the term "political correctness," as
opposed to factual correctness."

Truth is whatever you want to make
it, just as the Constitution now means whatever the Ruling Class says it
means.

While it’s obvious what a Clinton victory would mean, the
consequences of a Trump victory are far less certain. Codevilla is
pessimistic that there could be real change:

Because it is
difficult to imagine a Trump presidency even thinking about something so
monumental as replacing an entire ruling elite, much less leading his
constituency to accomplishing it, electing Trump is unlikely to result in a
forceful turn away from the country’s current direction. Continuing pretty
much on the current trajectory under the same class will further fuel
revolutionary sentiments in the land all by itself. Inevitable
disappointment with Trump is sure to add to them.

But the two great
revolutions of the twentieth century—the Bolshevik Revolution and National
Socialism—did indeed replace ruling elites. And of course, the fear that a
Trump victory would indeed lead to a wholesale replacement of our ruling
elite is behind the hysterical opposition that he has received from the
entire Establishment.

Codevilla’s conclusion is worth
pondering:

We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is
difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where
it will end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought
it about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate
manifestation. Regardless of who wins in 2016, this revolution’s
sentiments will grow in volume and intensity, and are sure to empower
politicians likely to make Americans nostalgic for Donald Trump’s
moderation. [Emphases added]

Finally, given my research interests, II
would be remiss if I did not mention the critical role played by Jews and
the organized Jewish community in the changes that are now coming to a
head.

There is no question that Jews are a prominent component of our new
elite and played a determinative role in passing the watershed 1965
immigration law. I have written five VDARE.com articles on Jewish
opposition to Trump, often expressed in terms of Jewish identity,
interests in multiculturalism, immigration and refugee policy, and fear
of a fascist America.

Given the very powerful position Jews enjoy in
the American media (summarized briefly here and more extensively here, pp.
xlvi-lvi), they necessarily play a major role in the anti-Trump
movement.

Jewish opposition to Trump is virtually unanimous, and in the
Republican Party, Jewish neoconservatives are leading the #NeverTrump
movement. (One of them, Paul Ryan adviser Dan Senor, is rumored to have
leaked the Access Hollywoodtape, although the MSM seems reluctant to ask
him). According to 538, in 2012, around 70% of money given by Jews directly
to candidates went to Obama, while in 2016, 95% has gone to Clinton. [The
GOP’s Jewish Donors Are Abandoning Trump,By Eitan Hersh and Brian
Schaffner, September 21, 2016] Jews are vastly overrepresented among the
top donors to pro-Clinton PACs, while the Republican Jewish Coalition
has not endorsed Trump, with many donors switching to Clinton. Adelson,
after investing $93 million in the 2012 campaign for Republicans,
including $30 million to a Romney PAC, now says he will donate only $45
million, of which only $5 million will go to Trump, the rest going to
House and Senate candidates. [Donald Trump Gains the Support of a Former
‘Never Trump’ Billionaire, by Michal Addady, Fortune.com, September 20,
2016]

Codevilla says frankly that a deep unhappiness with the current
political culture is brewing that could ultimately lead to a
revolutionary upheaval.

Trump accomplished a hostile takeover of the
Republican Party. Can he accomplish a hostile takeover of the presidency in
the teeth of unanimous opposition from our hostile elites?

Over the past half century, the Reagan years notwithstanding, our
ruling class’s changing preferences and habits have transformed public and
private life in America. As John Marini shows in his essay, "Donald
Trump and the American Crisis," this has resulted in citizens morphing
into either this class’s "stakeholders" or its subjects. And, as Publius
Decius Mus argues, "America and the West" now are so firmly "on a
trajectory toward something very bad" that it is no longer reasonable to
hope that "all human outcomes are still possible," by which he means
restoration of the public and private practices that made the American
republic. In fact, the 2016 election is sealing the United States’s
transition from that republic to some kind of empire.

Electing either
Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump cannot change that trajectory. Because each
candidate represents constituencies hostile to republicanism, each in its
own way, these individuals are not what this election is about. This
election is about whether the Democratic Party, the ruling class’s enforcer,
will impose its tastes more strongly and arbitrarily than ever, or whether
constituencies opposed to that rule will get some ill-defined chance to
strike back. Regardless of the election’s outcome, the republic established
by America’s Founders is probably gone. But since the Democratic Party’s
constituencies differ radically from their opponents’, and since the
character of imperial governance depends inherently on the emperor, the
election’s result will make a big difference in our lives.

Many
Enemies, Few Friends

The overriding question of 2016 has been how eager
the American people are to reject the bipartisan class that has ruled this
country contrary to its majority’s convictions. Turned out, eager enough to
throw out the baby with the dirty bathwater. The ruling class’s united front
in response to the 2008 financial crisis had ignited the Tea Party’s call
for adherence to the Constitution, and led to elections that gave
control of both houses of Congress to the Republican Party. But as
Republicans became full partners in the ruling class’s headlong rush in
what most considered disastrous directions, Americans lost faith in the
Constitution’s power to restrain the wrecking of their way of
life.

From the primary season’s outset, the Democratic Party’s
candidates promised even more radical "transformations." When, rarely, they
have been asked what gives them the right to do such things they have acted
as if the only answer were Nancy Pelosi’s reply to whether the
Constitution allows the government to force us into Obamacare: "Are you
kidding? Are you kidding?"

On the Republican side, 17 hopefuls
promised much, without dealing with the primordial fact that, in today’s
America, those in power basically do what they please. Executive orders,
phone calls, and the right judge mean a lot more than laws. They even trump
state referenda. Over the past half-century, presidents have ruled not by
enforcing laws but increasingly through agencies that write their own rules,
interpret them, and punish unaccountably—the administrative state. As for
the Supreme Court, the American people have seen it invent rights where
there were none—e.g., abortion—while trammeling ones that had been the
republic’s spine, such as the free exercise of religion and freedom of
speech. The Court taught Americans that the word "public" can mean
"private" (Kelo v. City of New London), that "penalty" can mean "tax"
(King v. Burwell), and that holding an opinion contrary to its own can
only be due to an "irrational animus" (Obergefell v. Hodges).

What
goes by the name "constitutional law" has been eclipsing the U.S.
Constitution for a long time. But when the 1964 Civil Rights Act
substituted a wholly open-ended mandate to oppose "discrimination" for
any and all fundamental rights, it became the little law that ate the
Constitution. Now, because the Act pretended that the commerce clause
trumps the freedom of persons to associate or not with whomever they
wish, and is being taken to mean that it trumps the free exercise of
religion as well, bakers and photographers are forced to take part in
homosexual weddings. A commission in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
reported that even a church may be forced to operate its bathrooms
according to gender self-identification because it "could be seen as a
place of public accommodation if it holds a secular event, such as a
spaghetti supper, that is open to the general public." California came
very close to mandating that Catholic schools admit homosexual and
transgender students or close down. The Justice Department is studying
how to prosecute on-line transactions such as vacation home rental site
Airbnb, Inc., that fall afoul of its evolving anti-discrimination
standards.

This arbitrary power, whose rabid guard-dog growls and barks:
"Racist! Sexist! Homophobic!" has transformed our lives by removing
restraints on government. The American Bar Association’s new professional
guidelines expose lawyers to penalties for insufficient political
correctness. Performing abortions or at least training to perform them may
be imposed as a requirement for licensing doctors, nurses, and hospitals
that offer services to the general public.

Addressing what it would
take to reestablish the primacy of fundamental rights would have required
Republican candidates to reset the Civil Rights movement on sound
constitutional roots. Surprised they didn’t do it?

No one running for the
GOP nomination discussed the greatest violation of popular government’s
norms—never mind the Constitution—to have occurred in two hundred years,
namely, the practice, agreed upon by mainstream Republicans and Democrats,
of rolling all of the government’s expenditures into a single bill. This
eliminates elected officials’ responsibility for any of the government’s
actions, and reduces them either to approving all that the government does
without reservation, or the allegedly revolutionary, disloyal act of
"shutting down the government."

Rather than talk about how to restrain or
shrink government, Republican candidates talked about how to do more with
government. The Wall Street Journal called that "having a positive agenda."
Hence, Republicans by and large joined the Democrats in relegating the U.S.
Constitution to history’s dustbin.

Because Republicans largely agree
with Democrats that they need not take seriously the founders’ Constitution,
today’s American regime is now what Max Weber had called the Tsarist regime
on the eve of the Revolution: "fake constitutionalism." Because such fakery
is self-discrediting and removes anyone’s obligation to restrain his
passions, it is a harbinger of revolution and of imperial power.

The
ruling class having chosen raw power over law and persuasion, the American
people reasonably concluded that raw power is the only way to counter it,
and looked for candidates who would do that. Hence, even constitutional
scholar Ted Cruz stopped talking about the constitutional implications of
President Obama’s actions after polls told him that the public was more
interested in what he would do to reverse them, niceties notwithstanding.
Had Cruz become the main alternative to the Democratic Party’s dominion, the
American people might have been presented with the option of reverting to
the rule of law. But that did not happen. Both of the choices before us
presuppose force, not law.

A Change of Regimes

All ruling classes
are what Shakespeare called the "makers of manners." Plato, in The Republic,
and Aristotle, in his Politics, teach that polities reflect the persons who
rise to prominence within them, whose habits the people imitate, and who set
the tone of life in them. Thus a polity can change as thoroughly as a chorus
changes from comedy to tragedy depending on the lyrics and music. Obviously,
the standards and tone of life that came from Abraham Lincoln’s Oval Office
is quite opposite from what came from the same place when Bill Clinton used
it. Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm was arguably the world’s most polite
society. Under Hitler, it became the most murderous.

In today’s
America, a network of executive, judicial, bureaucratic, and social kinship
channels bypasses the sovereignty of citizens. Our imperial regime, already
in force, works on a simple principle: the president and the cronies who
populate these channels may do whatever they like so long as the bureaucracy
obeys and one third plus one of the Senate protects him from impeachment. If
you are on the right side of that network, you can make up the rules as you
go along, ignore or violate any number of laws, obfuscate or commit perjury
about what you are doing (in the unlikely case they put you under oath), and
be certain of your peers’ support. These cronies’ shared social and
intellectual identity stems from the uniform education they have received in
the universities. Because disdain for ordinary Americans is this ruling
class's chief feature, its members can be equally certain that all will
join in celebrating each, and in demonizing their respective
opponents.

And, because the ruling class blurs the distinction between
public and private business, connection to that class has become the
principal way of getting rich in America. Not so long ago, the way to make
it here was to start a business that satisfied customers’ needs better than
before. Nowadays, more businesses die each year than are started. In this
century, all net additions in employment have come from the country’s
1,500 largest corporations. Rent-seeking through influence on
regulations is the path to wealth. In the professions, competitive exams
were the key to entry and advancement not so long ago. Now, you have to
make yourself acceptable to your superiors. More important, judicial
decisions and administrative practice have divided Americans into
"protected classes"—possessed of special privileges and immunities—and
everybody else. Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are
memories. Co-option is the path to power. Ever wonder why the quality of
our leaders has been declining with each successive
generation?

Moreover, since the Kennedy reform of 1965, and with greater
speed since 2009, the ruling class’s immigration policy has changed the
regime by introducing some 60 million people—roughly a fifth of our
population—from countries and traditions different from, if not hostile,
to ours. Whereas earlier immigrants earned their way to prosperity, a
disproportionate percentage of post-1965 arrivals have been encouraged
to become dependents of the state. Equally important, the ruling class
chose to reverse America’s historic practice of assimilating immigrants,
emphasizing instead what divides them from other Americans. Whereas
Lincoln spoke of binding immigrants by "the electric cord" of the
founders’ principles, our ruling class treats these principles as
hypocrisy. All this without votes or law; just power.

Foul is Fair
and Fair is Foul

In short, precisely as the classics defined regime
change, people and practices that had been at society’s margins have been
brought to its center, while people and ideas that had been central have
been marginalized.

Fifty years ago, prayer in the schools was near
universal, but no one was punished for not praying. Nowadays, countless
people are arrested or fired for praying on school property. West Point’s
commanding general reprimanded the football coach for his team’s
thanksgiving prayer. Fifty years ago, bringing sexually explicit stuff into
schools was treated as a crime, as was "procuring abortion." Nowadays,
schools contract with Planned Parenthood to teach sex, and will not tell
parents when they take girls to PP facilities for abortions. Back then, many
schools worked with the National Rifle Association to teach gun handling and
marksmanship. Now students are arrested and expelled merely for pointing
their finger and saying "bang." In those benighted times, boys who
ventured into the girls’ bathroom were expelled as perverts. Now, girls
are suspended for objecting to boys coming into the girls’ room under
pretense of transgenderism. The mainstreaming of pornography, the
invention of abortion as the most inalienable of human rights and, most
recently, the designation of opposition to homosexual marriage as a
culpable psychosis—none of which is dictated by law enacted by elected
officials—is enforced as if it had been. No surprise that America has
experienced a drastic drop in the formation of families, with the rise
of rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites equal to the rates among
blacks that was recognized as disastrous a half-century ago, the
near-disappearance of two-parent families among blacks, and the social
dislocations attendant to all that.

Ever since the middle of the 20th
century our ruling class, pursuing hazy concepts of world order without
declarations of war, has sacrificed American lives first in Korea, then in
Vietnam, and now throughout the Muslim world. By denigrating Americans who
call for peace, or for wars unto victory over America’s enemies; by excusing
or glorifying those who take our enemies’ side or who disrespect the
American flag; our rulers have drawn down the American regime’s credit and
eroded the people’s patriotism.

As the ruling class destroyed its own
authority, it wrecked the republic’s as well. This is no longer the "land
where our fathers died," nor even the country that won World War II. It
would be surprising if any society, its identity altered and its most
fundamental institutions diminished, had continued to function as before.
Ours sure does not, and it is difficult to imagine how it can do so ever
again. We can be sure only that the revolution underway among us, like all
others, will run its unpredictable course.

All we know is the choice
that faces us at this stage: either America continues in the same direction,
but faster and without restraint, or there’s the hazy possibility of
something else.

Imperial Alternatives

The consequences of
empowering today’s Democratic Party are crystal clear. The Democratic
Party—regardless of its standard bearer—would use its victory to drive the
transformations that it has already wrought on America to quantitative and
qualitative levels that not even its members can imagine. We can be sure of
that because what it has done and is doing is rooted in a logic that has
animated the ruling class for a century, and because that logic has shaped
the minds and hearts of millions of this class’s members, supporters, and
wannabes.

That logic’s essence, expressed variously by Herbert Croly and
Woodrow Wilson, FDR’s brains trust, intellectuals of both the old and the
new Left, choked back and blurted out by progressive politicians, is this:
America’s constitutional republic had given the American people too much
latitude to be who they are, that is: religiously and socially
reactionary, ignorant, even pathological, barriers to Progress.
Thankfully, an enlightened minority exists with the expertise and the
duty to disperse the religious obscurantism, the hypocritical talk of
piety, freedom, and equality, which excuses Americans’ racism, sexism,
greed, and rape of the environment. As we progressives take up our
proper responsibilities, Americans will no longer live politically
according to their prejudices; they will be ruled administratively
according to scientific knowledge.

Progressivism’s programs have
changed over time. But its disdain for how other Americans live and think
has remained fundamental. More than any commitment to principles, programs,
or way of life, this is its paramount feature. The media reacted to Hillary
Clinton’s remark that "half of Trump’s supporters could be put into a
‘basket of deplorables’" as if these sentiments were novel and peculiar to
her. In fact, these are unremarkable restatements of our ruling class’s
perennial creed.

The pseudo-intellectual argument for why these
"deplorables" have no right to their opinions is that giving equal
consideration to people and positions that stand in the way of Progress is
"false equivalence," as President Obama has put it. But the same idea has
been expressed most recently and fully by New York Times CEO Mark Thompson,
as well as Times columnists Jim Rutenberg, Timothy Egan, and William Davies.
In short, devotion to truth means not reporting on Donald Trump and people
like him as if they or anything they say might be of value.

If trying
to persuade irredeemable socio-political inferiors is no more appropriate
than arguing with animals, why not just write them off by sticking
dismissive names on them? Doing so is less challenging, and makes you feel
superior. Why wrestle with the statistical questions implicit in Darwin when
you can just dismiss Christians as Bible-thumpers? Why bother arguing for
Progressivism’s superiority when you can construct "scientific" studies like
Theodor Adorno’s, proving that your opponents suffer from degrees of
"fascism" and other pathologies? This is a well-trod path. Why, to take an
older example, should General Omar Bradley have bothered trying to refute
Douglas MacArthur’s statement that in war there is no substitute for victory
when calling MacArthur and his supporters "primitives" did the trick?
Why wrestle with our climate’s complexities when you can make up your
own "models," being sure that your class will treat them as
truth?

What priorities will the ruling class’s notion of scientific truth
dictate to the next Democratic administration? Because rejecting that
true and false, right and wrong are objectively ascertainable is part of
this class’s DNA, no corpus of fact or canon of reason restrains it or
defines its end-point. Its definition of "science" is neither more nor
less than what "scientists say" at any given time. In practice, that
means "Science R-Us," now and always, exclusively. Thus has come to pass
what President Dwight Eisenhower warned against in his 1960 Farewell
address: "A steadily increasing share [of science] is conducted for, by,
or at the direction of, the Federal government.… [T]he free university,
historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery,
has experienced a revolution…a government contract becomes virtually a
substitute for intellectual curiosity." Hence, said Ike, "The prospect
of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project
allocations, and the power of money is ever present—and is gravely to be
regarded." The result has been that academics rise through government
grants while the government exercises power by claiming to act on
science’s behalf. If you don’t bow to the authority of the power that
says what is and is not so, you are an obscurantist or worse.

Under
our ruling class, "truth" has morphed from the reflection of objective
reality to whatever has "normative pull"—i.e., to what furthers the ruling
class’s agenda, whatever that might be at any given time. That is the
meaning of the term "political correctness," as opposed to factual
correctness.

It’s the Contempt, Stupid!

Who, a generation ago,
could have guessed that careers and social standing could be ruined by
stating the fact that the paramount influence on the earth’s climate is the
sun, that its output of energy varies and with it the climate? Who, a decade
ago, could have predicted that stating that marriage is the union of a man
and a woman would be treated as a culpable sociopathy, or just yesterday
that refusing to let certifiably biological men into women’s bathrooms would
disqualify you from mainstream society? Or that saying that the lives of
white people "matter" as much as those of blacks is evidence of racism?
These strictures came about quite simply because some sectors of the ruling
class felt like inflicting them on the rest of America. Insulting
presumed inferiors proved to be even more important to the ruling class
than the inflictions’ substance.

How far will our rulers go? Because
their network is mutually supporting, they will go as far as they want.
Already, there is pressure from ruling class constituencies, as well as
academic arguments, for morphing the concept of "hate crime" into the
criminalization of "hate speech"—which means whatever these loving folks
hate. Of course this is contrary to the First Amendment, and a wholesale
negation of freedom. But it is no more so than the negation of freedom of
association that is already eclipsing religious freedom in the name of
anti-discrimination. It is difficult to imagine a Democratic president,
Congress, and Supreme Court standing in the way.

Above all, these
inflictions, as well as the ruling class’s acceptance of its own members’
misbehavior, came about because millions of its supporters were happy, or
happy enough, to support them in the interest of maintaining their own
status in a ruling coalition while discomfiting their socio-political
opponents. Consider, for example, how republic-killing an event was the
ruling class’s support of President Bill Clinton in the wake of his
nationally televised perjury. Subsequently, as constituencies of supporters
have effectively condoned officials’ abusive, self-serving, and even
outright illegal behavior, they have encouraged more and more of it while
inuring themselves to it. That is how republics turn into empires from the
roots up.

But it is also true, as Mao Tse-Tung used to say, "a fish
begins to rot at the head." If you want to understand why any and all future
Democratic Party administrations can only be empires dedicated to
injuring and insulting their subjects, look first at their intellectual
leaders’ rejection of the American republic’s most fundamental
principles.

The Declaration of Independence says that all men "are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" among which are
"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." These rights—codified in the
Constitution’s Bill of Rights—are not civil rights that governments may
define. The free exercise of religion, freedom of speech and assembly,
keeping and bearing arms, freedom from warrantless searches, protection
against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, trial by jury of one’s
peers, etc., are natural rights that pertain to human beings as such.
Securing them for Americans is what the United States is all about. But
today’s U.S. Civil Rights Commission advocates truncating the foremost
of these rights because, as it stated in a recent report, "Religious
exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications
such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual
orientation, and gender identity, when they are permissible,
significantly infringe upon those civil rights." The report explains why
the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of
Rights should not be permissible: "The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and
‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as
they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism,
homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy, or any form of
intolerance."

Hillary Clinton’s attack on Trump supporters merely matched
the ruling class’s current common sense. Why should government workers and
all who wield the administrative state’s unaccountable powers not follow
their leaders’ judgment, backed by the prestige press, about who are to be
treated as citizens and who is to be handled as deplorable refuse?
Hillary Clinton underlined once again how the ruling class regards us,
and about what it has in store for us.

Electing Donald Trump would
result in an administration far less predictable than any Democratic one. In
fact, what Trump would or would not do, could or could not do, pales into
insignificance next to the certainty of what any Democrat would do. That is
what might elect Trump.

The character of an eventual Trump Administration
is unpredictable because speculating about Trump’s mind is futile. It is
equally futile to guess how he might react to the mixture of flattery and
threats sure to be leveled against him. The entire ruling class—Democrats
and Republicans, the bulk of the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the
press—would do everything possible to thwart him; and the constituencies
that chose him as their candidate, and that might elect him, are surely
not united and are by no means clear about the demands they would press.
Moreover, it is anyone’s guess whom he would appoint and how he would
balance his constituencies’ pressures against those of the ruling
class.

Never before has such a large percentage of Americans expressed
alienation from their leaders, resentment, even fear. Some two-thirds of
Americans believe that elected and appointed officials—plus the courts,
the justice system, business leaders, educators—are leading the country
in the wrong direction: that they are corrupt, do more harm than good,
make us poorer, get us into wars and lose them. Because this majority
sees no one in the political mainstream who shares their concerns,
because it lacks confidence that the system can be fixed, it is eager to
empower whoever might flush the system and its denizens with something
like an ungentle enema.

Yet the persons who express such
revolutionary sentiments are not a majority ready to support a coherent
imperial program to reverse the course of America’s past half-century.
Temperamentally conservative, these constituencies had been most attached to
the Constitution and been counted as the bedrock of stability. They are not
yet wholly convinced that there is little left to conserve. What they want,
beyond an end to the ruling class’s outrages, has never been clear. This is
not surprising, given that the candidates who appeal to their concerns do so
with mere sound bites. Hence they chose as the presidential candidate of
the nominal opposition party the man who combined the most provocative
anti-establishment sounds with reassurance that it won’t take much to
bring back good old America: Donald Trump. But bringing back good old
America would take an awful lot. What could he do to satisfy
them?

Trump’s propensity for treating pronouncements on policy as flags
to be run up and down the flagpole as he measures the volume of the applause
does not deprive them of all significance—especially the ones that
confirm his anti-establishment bona fides. These few policy items happen
to be the ones by which he gained his anti-establishment reputation in
the first place: 1) opposition to illegal immigration, especially the
importation of Muslims whom Americans reasonably perceive as hostile to
us; 2) law and order: stop excusing rioters and coddling criminals; 3)
build a wall, throw out the illegals, let in only people who are vetted
and certified as supporters of our way of life (that’s the way it was
when I got my immigrant visa in 1955), and keep out anybody we can’t be
sure isn’t a terrorist. Trump’s tentative, partial retreat from a bit of
the latter nearly caused his political standing to implode, prompting
the observation that doing something similar regarding abortion would
end his political career. That is noteworthy because, although Trump’s
support of the pro-life cause is lukewarm at best, it is the defining
commitment for much of his constituency. The point here is that,
regardless of his own sentiments, Trump cannot wholly discount his
constituencies’ demands for a forceful turn away from the country’s
current direction.

Trump’s slogan—"make America great again"—is the
broadest, most unspecific, common denominator of non-ruling-class Americans’
diverse dissatisfaction with what has happened to the country. He talks
about reasserting America’s identity, at least by controlling the borders;
governing in America’s own interest rather than in pursuit of objectives
of which the American people have not approved; stopping the export of
jobs and removing barriers to business; and banishing political
correctness’s insults and injuries. But all that together does not
amount to making America great again. Nor does Trump begin to explain
what it was that had made this country great to millions who have known
only an America much diminished.

In fact, the United States of
America was great because of a whole bunch of things that now are gone. Yes,
the ruling class led the way in personal corruption, cheating on tests,
lowering of professional standards, abandoning churches and synagogues for
the Playboy Philosophy and lifestyle, disregarding law, basing economic life
on gaming the administrative state, basing politics on conflicting
identities, and much more. But much of the rest of the country followed.
What would it take to make America great again—or indeed to make any of the
changes that Trump’s voters demand? Replacing the current ruling class would
be only the beginning.

Because it is difficult to imagine a Trump
presidency even thinking about something so monumental as replacing an
entire ruling elite, much less leading his constituency to accomplishing it,
electing Trump is unlikely to result in a forceful turn away from the
country’s current direction. Continuing pretty much on the current
trajectory under the same class will further fuel revolutionary sentiments
in the land all by itself. Inevitable disappointment with Trump is sure to
add to them.

We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is
difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where
it will end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought
it about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate
manifestation. Regardless of who wins in 2016, this revolution’s
sentiments will grow in volume and intensity, and are sure to empower
politicians likely to make Americans nostalgic for Donald Trump’s
moderation. ==

About Me

'Mission statement'.
I am convinced that jewish individuals and groups have an enormous influence on the world. The MSM are, for almost all people, the only source of information, and these are largely controlled by jewish people.
So there is a huge under-reporting on jewish influence in the world.
I see it as my mission to try to close this gap. To quote Henry Ford: "Corral the 50 wealthiest jews and there will be no wars." `(Thomas Friedman wrote the same in Haaretz, about the war against Iraq! See yellow marked area, blog 573)
If that is true, my mission must be very beneficial to humanity.